Connoisseurs of fine pianos and fine sound might find themselves
more engaged by the second volume of the Ravel piano music from
Portuguese pianist Artur Pizarro than they were by the first,
fine though that was. The first volume of Pizarro’s collection
was recorded in Portugal in 2006 with a standard Hamburg Steinway
D. Volume Two finds lovely nuance in the sound of a less commonly
heard Bluthner nine-foot concert grand. It’s an instrument with
a more haloed treble than the typical Steinway, and with a less
woody sound than the Bösendorfer Gordon Fergus-Thompson used for
his ASV recordings. Volume Two of Pizarro’s cycle offers a more
inviting tone than the more neutral theatrical venue used in the
earlier instalment. In terms of performance, what is remarkable
is that much of Pizarro’s first instalment was at rather fleet
tempos, particularly in a swift and impressive Gaspard de la
Nuit. Volume Two explores more spacious speeds, particularly
in Le Tombeau de Couperin, where Pizarro takes close to
26 minutes, slower than the modern average. Does the piano, with
its rich, slowly decaying overtones, have anything to do with
that? Hard to say for sure, but it’s possible.

First off, the givens
in this music are a pair of classic cycles, and a pair of modern
recordings. The most hailed classic recordings are the chiselled
marble of Walter Gieseking (EMI) and the dry but warm sparkle
of Robert Casadesus (Columbia/Sony). Both cycles date back to
the mid-twentieth century and have worn well over the years,
remaining essential to the understanding of this music. In terms
of recorded sound, though, they can’t offer much competition
to modern recordings. At the modern end of the spectrum, the
most hailed recordings are the stylish, dashing one by Jean-Yves
Thibaudet, and the thoughtful, illuminating one by Angela Hewitt.
Both are recorded well, particularly the Hewitt, which is on
a pair of hybrid, high-resolution discs from Hyperion. This
newcomer boasts similarly refined sound, on an even more intimate
scale, and offers worthwhile interpretations. For comparison,
I’ve also revisited a number of other recordings from over the
years, including ones by Vlado Perlemuter, Pascal Rogé, Philippe
Entremont, Cécile Ousset, Boris Berezovsky, and others.

Le Tombeau de
Couperin is arguably the most important item in Pizarro’s
second disc, and it may have been the reason for the player’s
choice of instrument, both in terms of the piano’s sound and,
more specifically, in how he interacts with the instrument.
The Bluthner’s gleaming treble suits Ravel’s neo-classic work
well in brightness, but its overtone richness is also consonant
with a more spacious approach. In this, Pizarro vaguely echoes
Gieseking, who is the only player who clearly conveys that this
is not happy music; that the movements, for all their surface
charm, are little epitaphs for friends Ravel lost during World
War One. Pizarro captures this feel in places, though he’s a
little too offhandedly chipper in the Rigaudon. My favourite
part of Pizarro’s rendition is the broadly paced Forlane,
which has a lovely, mysterious quality not unlike the way Stanislaw
Skrowaczewski handled the orchestral transcription in his orchestral
recording of Le Tombeau for Vox in 1974. Those who rush
through this movement miss an exquisite harmonic agony. Pizarro
gives it room to register on the senses.

Among some of the
other recordings, Philippe Entremont’s bargain set on Sony has
some of its best moments here. In general, I find the Entremont
set a little overly-close in microphone placement, tending toward
a certain hardness of piano sound. Further, it isn’t very well-balanced
in terms of stereo spread, with the bulk of the sound usually
— but not always — tending toward the left channel, suggesting
that takes were cobbled together from different recording sessions
without much regard for microphone placement. The hard clarity
of tone gives this deceptive piece the edge it needs to convey
the dark emotions lurking beneath the poised surfaces. Vlado
Perlemuter, a friend and student of Ravel tended to keep those
shadows carefully at bay, playing with elegant whimsy. He whips
up the surfaces in his broadcast recording of Le Tombeau,
freely springing rhythms in a manner which makes the music fairly
leap from the speakers, even if the 1970 BBC sound is narrow
and not particularly flattering. I love both Perlemuter’s unhurried
wit in the Rigaudon and his liquid shaping of the Menuet,
which gets static in too many performances. Pizarro doesn’t
spring his rhythms quite so much, though there is a hint of
that in his treatment of the Prélude. Another poised
and sprung performance, now alas mostly forgotten, is the 1980
DG debut recording by American-born pianist David Lively, winner
of the Dino Ciani Competition in Italy. Lively has continued
over the years with a distinguished career based in France.
It would be wonderful to hear what thirty years have added to
the youthful zest of his playing, which even then showed the
hallmarks of the finest elements of the French school.

Pizarro’s Valses
nobles et sentimentales, the finest thing on this album,
are very much influenced by the sound of his Bluthner piano,
with its bright but gauzy upper register. This gives everything
a shimmer of treble sound, which Pizarro wisely plays against
in many places, using clipped phrasing to keep notes clear despite
the lovely halo surrounding them. He also uses this built-in
sheen as a way to turn his attention to slightly but noticeably
more spacious explorations of this music than is customary.
If Gieseking is sober, Berezovsky is glittering, Ousset is gentle,
Rogé is poised and Entremont is haughty in these evocations
of the dance, then Pizarro is easily the most richly poignant.
Take, for example, the tiny sixth waltz, marked “Vif.” Most
performances dash it off in a tipsy whirl, around 35 to 40 seconds.
Pizarro takes slightly longer, around 45 seconds, giving his
performance the slight lag of a celebrant who is already past
tipsy and heading toward emotionality. The ensuing instability
of tempo Pizarro uses to colour the desperate, leaping joy of
the next waltz, thus follows perfectly. His final waltz is slow,
tinged with long shadows of regret, finding some powerful psychology
in music that is all too often treated as pure surface. Linn’s
high-resolution recording is especially delightful in the way
it captures a rich range of overtones, particularly in the closing
measures of the final waltz.

I like Rogé’s understated
elegance in the Sonatine, which Pizarro comes close to
matching, albeit with his much different piano’s sound and consistently
broader tempos. For those more interested in hearing the piece
regarded as a virtuoso display, there’s always the 1994 Teldec
recording by Boris Berezovsky. His first movement is hardly
“Modéré,” and his finale goes well past “Animé” in tempo, but
it is impressively glittering, in its way, and is nicely recorded.
Cécile Ousset hit a nice balance between the showy and the reserved
in her 1988 EMI recording, for those interested in that option.
The structural-minded Gordon Fergus-Thompson is in his element
here, with a fine and feisty rendition.

The smaller works
are what they are, which is to say pretty much filler. The most
substantial and famous of them is the Pavane pour une Infante
défunte, where Pizarro breaks his tendency toward slower
tempos and goes for a nicely flowing rendition. He perhaps keeps
in mind Ravel’s droll reminder to a student that it was supposed
to be a pavane for a dead princess, not a dead pavane for a
princess. For that matter, though, I don’t think the piece loses
much even if it is moved along even faster, as Perlemuter did
in his 1957 Vox recording. The Menuet antique is handled
spaciously here. This is a good thing, because the resonance
and overtones of Pizarro’s Bluthner grand are so thick, it’s
almost like a blinding white sheen of sound when Ravel starts
the piece with those closely-spaced high chords. If Ravel was
after a sunlight glinting on marble kind of effect, Pizarro
has certainly caught it here. The other pieces, none of which
would get recorded very often if they weren’t part of the complete
piano works of Ravel, namely, the Prélude, the Menuet
sur le nom d’Haydn, and the two À la manière pieces,
are played patiently, with emphasis on the distinctive sound
of the instrument.

As noted above,
the recorded sound here is warm, gleaming and intimate. The
multi-channel layout is presumably 5.0, as the subwoofer channel
isn’t needed for this music, but the disc’s small print doesn’t
clearly say. Suffice to say that this is up to Linn’s premium
sound standards.

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